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This anecdote gives the key to the character of this extraordinary monarch, the Sir Galahad of crowned heads, who up to the last moment would not believe that England and France would fight against him for the interests of Turkey, and who never wavered in his trust in Queen Victoria, whom he immensely admired since the visit which he had paid to her at Windsor when she was quite a young wife, and whose portrait adorned his writing-table to the last days of his life. Intensely as he hated English politicians and politics, he made a distinction between the Queen and her Ministers, and whilst distrusting the latter, had the utmost respect for the former, though at the same time not being able to understand the mechanism of constitutional government, nor how impossible it was for an English Sovereign to go against her Parliament or the opinion of her responsible advisers. He attributed to timidity on the part of Queen Victoria the failure of his attempt to come to a direct understanding with her, as he had tried to establish by means of a correspondence, which had not relieved the tension existing between the Court of St. James and that of St. Petersburg in regard to the Eastern Question; and anyone who would have told him that his personality was not sympathetic to the Queen would have profoundly surprised him. In his opinion all Sovereigns ought to like one another, and prejudice in regard to each other was a thing he would not admit, any more than he would admit the right of intruders, such as, in his opinion, were Napoleon III. and Louis Philippe, to hold their own against monarchs “by the grace of God.”